AWS Case Study: OpenCrowd

The design and development firm OpenCrowd creates custom Rich Internet Applications, social apps, and cloud-enabled apps, for a wide variety of clients. OpenCrowd’s clientele include organizations of all sizes, from large financial institutions to small start-up endeavors in an array of industries from health care to entertainment. The firm combines a user-centric design approach, with a focus on leveraging business insights and progressive technology to create innovative solutions. OpenCrowd is based in New York.

OpenCrowd has been utilizing Amazon Web Services (AWS) since 2007. The firm employs an assortment of AWS products, including the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides cloud-based resizable computing.

OpenCrowd is also taking advantage of Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), which stores messages traveling between computers, as well as the Web-based date storage solution Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). OpenCrowd uses this collection of AWS features to host client applications and rapidly build applications using its Python/Django Web application framework.

OpenCrowd reports that it is benefitting from the financial and technological flexibility of AWS and believes that others should also embrace these benefits. Brad Buck, Head of Architecture and Strategy says, “Our approach to building new products and services often includes rapid prototyping of key features for user validation. By using AWS, we avoid long provisioning cycles that dramatically prolong the prototyping phase. For both large enterprises and start-ups, we recommend customers use AWS to test new application concepts rapidly to verify concepts and generate organizational momentum.”

One of OpenCrowd’s recent clients is newcomer PlumLife, which provides online technology focused on organizing all aspects of household tasks and events. OpenCrowd helped PlumLife design and develop both its prototype and its market-ready application. Because PlumLife is a start-up organization, OpenCrowd was charged with building the new application quickly and within a fixed budget.

Buck says, “We chose to build PlumLife using Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon SQS, and Amazon S3 because of its rapid provisioning, low administration overhead, and the ability to simply resize infrastructure to meet PlumLife’s need for a rapid build and launch. In addition to the ease of horizontal and vertical scalability of AWS, the zero database administration of Amazon RDS for upgrades and security patching greatly reduces disruptions when deadlines are critical.”

Like the PlumLife project, the majority of OpenCrowd’s projects must be completed quickly and on time because most of its projects are based upon a fixed price and a fixed timeline. OpenCrowd’s CEO Sushil Prabhu states, “AWS is a perfect match because it is an on-demand, elastic model, which reduces delivery risk. With Amazon EC2, we don’t have to worry about getting a new server, and Amazon RDS allows us to expand our database size on the fly when capacity demands exceed expectations. If additional capacity is needed, there are no headaches or a bureaucracy that impedes us from meeting our customer’s needs and deadlines.”

To learn more, visit http://www.opencrowd.com/ This link will launch in a new browser window or tab. .